Peter Stanley

Sad that the only vacant shop in Smithfield shopping mall, Cairns, is a bookshop. What does that say?

Me too! I say that having just rolled back to our hotel in Palm Cove after a four-course dinner on New Year’s Eve- happy new year, David & Kristen and good luck with the book business!

Hands off our State Library! Library workers deliver essential services to 2.8 million people in our community each year. They run information services, connect people online, hold free workshops, develop community connections an...

This cause is close to my heart - please sign: www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/ha...

“Are you feeling upset by the archives you’re reading?”
Well, bloody grow up! You’re only reading about it, FFS!
The Victorian Archives Centre has a “sanctuary space” so you can be “traumatised “ in private. Good grief…

I’ve just finished reading Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2005) - about the Red Army in the ‘Great Patriotic War. She uses veterans’ testimony more sparingly than I expected. But her insights into veterans’ memories are excellent. It’s been useful for my present book, on the AIF in the Great War.

in 2016 a woman sued him for raping her when she was 13. The day after he was elected President of the U.S. she dropped her case.
D’ye believe her now?
Still think she made it up for attention and money?
You know exactly who he is. You’ve always known.

The new version of The Forsyte Saga - The Forsytes - is absolute cobblers. Not a patch on the two earlier outings. Pretend Victorian - too many errors to count. It’s a melodrama - we won’t be watching episode 2. Hair, clothes, language - and a black stockbroker! Absolute rubbish.

Just visiting the excellent “1975” exhibition at the National Library of Australia. But look what you see on the very first panel - a warning that it deals with “some sensitive and distressing material “! Er, like every year in human history!

Defending Country | How about it Minister? Let's fill those Memorial Council vacancies Analysis of current state of play on Memorial vacancies

The Minister for Veterans' Affairs seems to be dragging his heels over new appointments to the Council of the Australian War Memorial. I've had a say about it at the invitation of the Canberra Times: www.defendingcountry.au/news/how-abo...

Very sad news from Canada. Respected Canadian military historian Tim Cook is dead. www.newswire.ca/news-release...
I only met him once, but I admired and respected his work. As I've just said to a friend, 'he was the Canadian Jeff Grey' - a power in the field.

This is a common problem in Australia - apparently, 'we' fought for freedom on Gallipoli - although everyone alive in 1915 is now dead.

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Australian landing on Tarakan, the subject of my forthcoming book, Oboe One: Tarakan, 1945, to be published soon by #BigSky. This is the draft cover - the new one's even better. It's a revised version of my 1997 book Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy.

Dr David Stephens, key player in Defending Country (which tries to hold the Australian War Memorial accountable over its representation of the Australian Wars, aka Frontier Conflict) thinks that the AWM has produced an exhibition about Defending Country, 'Critical Witness'. Apt, but no such luck ...

ArtSound FM Canberra is broadcasting my radio play 'Wanterwrite, Wanterlove' ( dramatising the courtship of Charles and Effie in 1920) at 1pm on Anzac Day, 4pm on the 27th and 10pm on the 28th - and you can listen to it outside Canberra on DAB+ 90.3 or on artsound.fm - listen any time. Enjoy!

search.app/57LfHNfcCCiD...

I’m looking forward to speaking in the online talks program of the admirable Military History and Heritage Victoria, this evening 7pm.

I visited the Australian War Memorial yesterday and was pleased to see that the 10-pounder mountain gun, used by the Indian mountain batteries at Anzac, is still on display in the Gallipoli gallery. Their service is documented in my Die in Battle - the first book on Indians on Gallipoli (2015). #AWM

Yes! Garry Hills’s Great at Heart is a really good book, one we’ve been waiting for since Gavin Long died in 1968!

Whyalla needs all the help it can get. It’s not charity - Whyalla produces three-quarters of Australia’s steel. If it goes under we’d be even more vulnerable to the vagaries of the world economy - and Trump’s shenanigans has shown how dangerous that can be.

One of the pleasures of a public library in Anzac season is to surreptitiously ensure that the book display features you and your friends.Here in Dickson (ACT), books by (l to r) Mark Johnston, me, Douglas Newton and Ross McMullin - all worth reading this April!

I don’t know a lot about philosophy and what Kant, Spinoza and the Natural Philosophy gang thought about the nature of things, but I think that this is very funny. Perhaps graphics (aka comics) can illuminate the world?

Joining AUKUS is one of the dumbest decisions any Australian government has ever taken. Why didn't Albanese say 'let's think about this ...' - and then decide, saying, 'this is a lot of money with no guarantee of any submarines being delivered - and it destroys Australia's national sovereignty'.

I'm delighted to tell you that at 1 pm on Anzac Day ArtSound FM Canberra will broadcast my radio play 'Wanterwrite, Wanterlove' - about the courtship of Charles and Effie Bean at Tuggeranong while Charles was writing Vol. I of his official history, in the aftermath of the Great War.

Yes! I can’t believe how many people use ‘female’ or ‘male’ as a noun. It’s just wrong.

How ironic that The English Association abets the decay of the English language, by, for example, using unnecessary new terms like ‘access’ as a verb. There are perfectly good options already available to us - think about it!

My daughters loved to have me read this book to them, aged about 3-7 in the mid-1990s. Happy days.